You would have to be as disconnected from current affairs as an Appalachian mountain man circa 1763, if you hadn’t noticed the heightened media coverage of China’s rise and competition with the West, and the West’s concomitant obsession with Chinese rising competitiveness. In Amy Chua’s recent book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” Chinese tough-love child rearing, which is shown to produce academically excellent and highly competitive children, is pitted against Western-style parenting, which is understood to condemn a child to a life of underachievement. The clash of ideologies – education and hard work versus scholastic slackerdom and daydreaming – is being played out against the backdrop of America’s rightfully lamentable educational system. If truth be told, our country’s current “education crisis” points to systemic failures that would undermine American competitiveness far more than the alleged softness, lenity, and indulgence of us non-Tiger parents.

Whether your kid is barred from having any fun at all, attending play dates (for what, to play?), or going to bed before midnight for fear of missing out on extra credits … or not, won’t change America’s standing as the most industrious and innovative – speak most competitive – nation on earth. Say, how bad can it be, if even our Harvard dropouts (sure, throw some Stanford preemies into the mix too) continue to launch industry-defining, multi-billion-dollar companies that soak up every software engineer in the Western hemisphere who can as much as fog a mirror? The issue, of course, is that there won’t be enough American scientists and engineers to around in order to fuel America’s celebrated and inexorable industrial growth engine.

But China’s talent gap is closing fast, the battle lines are drawn for all the brains we can get in business, and better shape up if your pedagogy entailed plunking the spoilt rugrats down in front of Baby Einstein and entrusting the rest of their rugrat lives to a sub-standard educational system. Behold the Tiger Mom! There is a whole triple concerto-for violin, cello, and piano-playing cadre of scientifically-trained elite engineers lurching for your kids’ lunch box. Here’s what you do: first, you panic. Then, take ‘em out of Kindergarten Mandarin class – for that won’t help either. Finally, go growl like a tiger and join in the battle cry of practice drills, public shaming, and wretched insults in the name of achieving amazing success for your sprout.

On the face of it, Chua’s “battle hymn” mémoire is a charming but insipid ode to the joy of non-permissive parenting (imagine a typical tigerish, middle-class striver, Sino-Anne Hathaway-type, wishing for nothing more than to impart on her daughters a winning start in the lottery of life – while trashing a dollhouse during a piano recital lacking in poise and calling her offspring “garbage” just to reinforce the point). The booklet’s central claim that an Asian child’s stereotypical success is due to superior Asian parenting is substantiated by anecdotal assertions that the relentless pursuit of academic excellence, the original ‘practice makes perfect’ mindset, respect for authority, and intolerance of mediocrity are all Chinese inventions (yes, yes … along with paper, printing, gunpowder, and the bloody compass).

By contrast – as sharp as a tiger’s claw – us pampering, mollycoddling, non-straight-A-grades-tolerating, and video game-allowing (yikes, even Wii-provisioning!) Westerners have long lost the upper hand in raising a formidable youth (harking back to when Mrs. Buffett would grill young Warren mercilessly on the ins and outs of asset allocation, when William Henry Gates III was shuttled back and forth between classes in BASIC programming and predatory business practice, and – here’s a shocker – when Richard Branson, Jr. was purposely left stranded at both street corners and rock concerts to find his way home, palpably by his very own mother in her attempt to teach that little dyslexic devil a lesson or two in self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship …).

To sum up, ever since the fall of Constantinople (in 1453) or Bill Clinton’s more contemporary publication of “My Life,” has Western parenting been on the decline. If you’re in your teens today and you ain’t Tiger Mom’s perfect little cub, or if you haven’t been raised by a pushy Korean um ma or even an old-fashioned nagging Jewish mamah, chances are you’ll have to struggle mightily to make your mark in the world against the onslaught of better educated and more motivated youngsters from afar. And if you’re a parent, in particular one of those ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ organic brassica-eating Montessori-Albert Schweitzer-ites (all non-competitive Barney and Friends-embracers-cum-spawners, as far as the Tiger Mom is concerned), you’re probably just jealous that your lesser fry hasn’t been playing Carnegie Hall at the age of 14, or you’re put out perhaps that this puerile 4-year-old of yours is still waving back at the Teletubbies.

If you belong to a book club that’s boycotting Tiger Mom’s nasty little trade secrets, fret not, mon soeur. Here’s what’s coming at you, without wishing to cause undue worry: there’s a continent’s worth of overachievers – waiting to pounce upon your children’s future jobs (like the hordes of Suleiman the Magnificent laying siege to the gates of Vienna in 1529). You must get up and unplug the Xbox right away and furthermore chasten your child to never Google a school problem’s answer again, but rather derive it from first principles like all applicants to Tsinghua University must be able to do, at the risk of getting beaten with the bamboo stick (how does a cell phone work, what is a microprocessor, how does your body absorb fat from food? … you get the point). That literary invention called globalization has obviously bound together the American and Chinese economies for the foreseeable future; while Amy Chua’s foray into popular literature has helped to politically desensitize the debate as to which culture can and will produce the brainzillas necessary for economic world domination.

It is now neither taboo to identify with extreme parenting nor to be loudly alarmed by the high, and mostly stress-related, suicide rate among China’s young people. When a group of teenagers from Shanghai posted top scores in an international test of practical knowledge in reading, mathematics, and science administered by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), Chinese mothers could feel vindicated, especially with the United States taking only 17th place in reading and coming in even lower in math and science. The question, of course, is not whether Chinese mothers are superior, along with their offspring, or whether Americans somehow wouldn’t wish to give their kids a winning start in life, but rather whether the US educational system is fit to train enough winning young adults in the future.

Some contend that education in this country is as broken as our health care system and would require a similarly complex overhaul, while costing the kind of money to fix that nobody is willing or able to pay. Moreover, with inequality sharply on the rise (the widening chasm between the rich and the poor within the country), what is emerging now and here is an unfortunate tale of two Americas. The inequitable distribution of wealth is closely mirrored by the unequal access to the kind of education befitting a Tiger Mom’s aspirations. Rich people pay for private schools and tutors or move their families into ZIP codes with excellent public schools (which in good/expensive neighborhoods resemble gleaming halls of learning that feed their graduates to the Ivy League; whereas students in bad/poor areas must enter their brain hospice through metal detectors). Two recent books on the subject of inequality, “Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich” by Robert Frank and “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making” by David Rothkopf, have shone a spotlight on unequal educational opportunity as a worsening social indicator, as the rich are getting (far) richer, while the poor are staying (relatively) poor. (Although it is unclear how exactly it is that inequality causes all sorts of social ills – from failing school grades, more teenage pregnancies, higher crime rates, to greater obesity – it is certain that the rising tide of America’s wealth boom has not lifted all boats.)

America’s ability to produce “Outliers” (as in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success”), individuals who will achieve extraordinary success in life is unparalleled. This will happen with or without Tiger Moms, with or without the “10,000-Hour Rule” (if you ever wondered how Mozart became Mozart, go spend 10,000 hours practicing a specific task and see what will happen). And in your blogger’s humble opinion, right after you’ve aced your reading, math, and science tests, other leading indicators for future employment success are “uncommon intelligence,” a passion for learning something new, and a knack for entrepreneurship. How to drill those into your kid’s head? Don’t ask the Tiger Mom. A new “Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Perhaps, for America must figure out how to transform its educational system to provide democratic / meritocratic access to top-notch learning to the majority of its people, not just a few. Always remember, there are far more Chinese Tiger Moms than there are people in the States, and not even our outliers and cognitive elite will be able to compete against them alone.

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Christophe Kolb

Christophe is one of the original pioneers of the technology-enabled remote services industry.

He co-founded Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com) in 2000 to help clients meet their staffing needs with flexible access to highly skilled IT professionals located offshore.

Talent Trust, the reliable and flexible offshore partner you’ve come to know and trust over the last decade is now tightly focused on providing innovative and affordable mobile solutions for the enterprise. Headquartered in San Francisco, Talent Trust employs mobile experts at our own development centers in Córdoba, Argentina and Lima, Peru.

What Makes Us Different? Experience the Power of Global Entrepreneurship.
Completely hands on and entrepreneurial to the core, our overseas management teams and senior developers have a direct interest in the success of their operation. This incentive model promotes long term resource continuity and ensures unconditional alignment with our clients’ success. As a result, our employees treat their clients’ projects as their own and infuse each engagement with an entrepreneur’s “must win” spirit – in contrast to the “nine to five” norm.

Backed by a Team of Local Experts.
In addition, a dedicated San Francisco-based engagement management team guarantees our clients’ satisfaction, specifically taking over the extra tasks associated with offshoring that arise from physical separation. An integral part of the Talent Trust offering, this onshore service is designed to take the friction out of working remotely and ranges in scope from: screening, matching, and allocating the resources; to monitoring their work along with productivity metrics, reporting on progress and project milestones, and facilitating communication; all the way to flagging and resolving any problems, timekeeping, and billing.

Are you looking to build valuable and cost-effective IT solutions that will help your company win in business? And are you looking for entrepreneurial resources that will go the extra mile to ensure your success? Then please visit our web site www.talenttrust.com to learn more, or contact me directly at christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com.

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Christophe Kolb

Christophe is one of the original pioneers of the technology-enabled remote services industry.

He co-founded Talent Trust (http://www.talenttrust.com) in 2000 to help clients meet their staffing needs with flexible access to highly skilled IT professionals located offshore.

Talent Trust, the reliable and flexible offshore partner you’ve come to know and trust over the last decade is now tightly focused on providing innovative and affordable mobile solutions for the enterprise. Headquartered in San Francisco, Talent Trust employs mobile experts at our own development centers in Córdoba, Argentina and Lima, Peru.

What Makes Us Different? Experience the Power of Global Entrepreneurship.
Completely hands on and entrepreneurial to the core, our overseas management teams and senior developers have a direct interest in the success of their operation. This incentive model promotes long term resource continuity and ensures unconditional alignment with our clients’ success. As a result, our employees treat their clients’ projects as their own and infuse each engagement with an entrepreneur’s “must win” spirit – in contrast to the “nine to five” norm.

Backed by a Team of Local Experts.
In addition, a dedicated San Francisco-based engagement management team guarantees our clients’ satisfaction, specifically taking over the extra tasks associated with offshoring that arise from physical separation. An integral part of the Talent Trust offering, this onshore service is designed to take the friction out of working remotely and ranges in scope from: screening, matching, and allocating the resources; to monitoring their work along with productivity metrics, reporting on progress and project milestones, and facilitating communication; all the way to flagging and resolving any problems, timekeeping, and billing.

Are you looking to build valuable and cost-effective IT solutions that will help your company win in business? And are you looking for entrepreneurial resources that will go the extra mile to ensure your success? Then please visit our web site www.talenttrust.com to learn more, or contact me directly at christophe.kolb@talenttrust.com.